Another Former General Sprints Through the Revolving Door
Laura Richardson spent her career characterizing Latin America as the US military’s ‘backyard’. In retirement, one of the contractors that benefitted from this rhetoric is helping her cash in.
If you find value in this article or in any of my other pieces, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.
The kind of in-depth, thoroughly researched journalism you read here takes a significant amount of time and effort to produce and your support will allow me to continue creating the type of content you’ve come to expect. A paid subscription is more than just access; it’s an investment in independent journalism and helps ensure this publication’s future.
As always, thank you for reading my work.
Legalized bribery takes many forms, and the board seat appointment is one of the oldest [and most lucrative] tricks in Washington’s playbook.
It’s a pipeline plenty of the military’s leaders partake in after serving. According to a 2023 analysis by the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, more than 80% of four-star officers locked down senior roles within the defense sector after retirement from the US Armed Forces after June 2018. These moves from the Pentagon to Wall Street are perfectly legal and, in many ways, expected.
Recently, Rolls-Royce announced that General Laura Richardson, who most recently served as the commander of US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), was going to follow in their footsteps. A March 3 press release confirmed that Richardson was one of two individuals who had joined the board of Rolls-Royce North America in January. [The other was, surprise, another retired general].
Rolls-Royce is of course much more than just a luxury car company, and is a prolific defense contractor active in a number of other highly profitable segments, such as civil aerospace and power systems. Given the general’s documented statements and the full scope of the firm’s portfolio in the region, the union is a perfect match.
When it comes to Richardson’s views on Latin America and the US government’s role in the world, the first thing that comes to mind are the comments she’d made a few years back about the need for a new “Marshall Plan” that would enable the US to keep a tight grip on its neighbors to the south.
While speaking to a roomful of defense and tech industry executives at the annual Aspen Security Forum in the summer of 2024, Richardson emphasized that this was needed to counter the regional influence Russia and China have accumulated in the last few years.
“Even though [U.S.] foreign direct investment … actually is really high, [regional leaders] don’t see it. All they see are the Chinese cranes and all the development, Belt and Road Initiative projects,” Richardson noted during the event.
“Why do I worry about the Chinese investment with the Belt and Road initiative?” Richardson added. “If it’s for doing good in the hemisphere, then I’m all for it. But it makes me a little suspicious when it’s in the critical infrastructure… deep water ports, 5G cybersecurity, energy, space… I worry about the dual use nature of that.”
These statements are as ludicrous as they are disingenuous.
For starters, they rest on the deeply irrational demand that the countries we’ve branded as enemies shouldn’t be allowed to have any economic connection to any nation in the Western Hemisphere. For Richardson [and so many others in Washington], this paranoia is rooted in the belief that these infrastructure investments are just a pretext for a potential Russian or Chinese military presence in “America’s backyard.”
“These are state-owned enterprises by a communist government that I worry about the flipping of that to a military application very quickly, if something were to happen, maybe in the Indo PACOM region, or something like that,” she also said.
While it’s undeniable that countries only invest overseas if there’s something in it for them to gain, the notion that Americans should view the construction of a shipping dock in Uruguay – a country more than 5,000 miles from the US – as an inherent threat to their safety is insane. Most of Washington’s lawmakers and pundits pretend to view projects like this with a great deal of suspicion, but this is nothing more than propaganda to justify the US government’s ongoing aggression in the Asia-Pacific.
Latin America is comprised of foreign, sovereign countries that have absolutely nothing to do with the US, and despite the noise from DC’s messaging machine, are not located in America’s “neighborhood”. These are individuals that take issue with economic collaborations on another continent, while simultaneously proclaiming that the US military has the right to traverse the Taiwan Strait just a few dozen miles from China’s shore.
Richardson provided the following comments during a hearing before the House Armed Services Committee in 2024:
